Ghost Villages for Sale in Spain | Hacker News Reader

Ghost Villages for Sale in Spain

bloomberg.com

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”The company recently got a boost after Gwyneth Paltrow flagged one of its villages on her website as a good Christmas present.”

I thought this was a joke, but clicking on the link reveals that a $172k village in Spain was indeed listed in “gift ideas” alongside such more traditional items as a $7700 Hermès surfboard.

As fitting a portrait of our present era’s wealth distribution as any. Future generations may look back on us as a bunch of Marie Antoinettes tinkering with our programming languages while the world burned.

This is the premise of the TV show Schitt’s Creek.

A wealthy family bought a small village called “Schitt’s Creek” as a joke in 1991 and it ends up being their sole remaining asset after losing everything and they have to move there.

It's a pretty darn funny show to boot! Glad you mentioned this.

The Goop article that's linked to is titled "The Ridiculous but Awesome Gift Guide." Goop's click-bait content game is strong.

And they're not the only ones, of course. That Hermès surfboard is an amazing artifact of our time, too. (Thanks for noting it -- I would have missed it otherwise.) It's a conspicuous consumption collaboration between Hermès and Ardmore, a media-savvy artists' collective in Kwazulu-Natal.

On the subject of "après nous, le déluge," I once did a product demo for some people who worked for a very wealthy family. TWe didn't have much background info except that the family office was "very interested" in our product (a high-end video conferencing/collaboration environment).

It turned out that the use case revolved around "gifting." I didn't understand what that meant. "The family gives a lot of gifts," was the explanation, "to each other, to other people outside the family." The people I gave the demo to were the two people on staff in charge of gifting. Two full-time people.

Heck, just look at the thread on the cancellation of Apple's wireless charger. Part of me wished I could post a gif of the daunting and terrifying task of putting a phone in a docking station.

You say that in jest, but that is actually how this process works. Remember when touchID came out and many people mockingly thanked Apple for not having to enter 4-6 digits? Now how many people get pissed off when their wet thumb doesn’t read right and they have to enter their pin?

People get used to new luxuries.

I’m wondering if I’m not the only person who’s not locking his smart-phone. At the same time I’m also making sure to never leave it out of sight and I have no Internet banking. I also have my WiFi network at home open, have had it for more than 10 years now.

That’s going to be fun when someone decides to use your connection to make a bomb thread, or worse, upload copyrighted content.

We don’t have that many bomb-threats in the country I live in and fortunately the big media companies haven’t yet got the local authorities by the balls when it comes to copyright infringement. Agreed, had I lived in a country like Germany I might have done differently.

I never used to lock my phone, but with fingerprint unlock the effort went away and so left it on.

At least apple’s implementation of it is so flawed it seems to require me to retry at least once >50% of the time.

Their face recognition however is amazing and works even in shitty conditions (such as dim light).

That seems unnecessarily risky to me.

It makes me not put on my phone things that I consider sensitive, like any of my CC details (the Apple account is connected to a spare debit card which hasn’t had any funds on it for quite some time), no sexting, no nude photos etc. I consider that a positive (and that’s why I thought a guy like Bezos would have been smarter than he really was, you cannot trust any electronic security thing when there’s literally a picture of your genital parts involved). On the other hand I’ve encountered lots of security-obsessed people here in HN who have given their fingerprints or, even worse, their face details to Apple on the premises of making their life more secure. I find that incredibly stupid.

Ya I just buy a new one when my current one runs out of juice.

There is a story from my home town Vienna that a certain celebrity would come to the phone shop ever 2 weeks buying a new battery. That continued for a few months until some clerk asked her what she did with all of those and she was thus introduced to charging.

I know what you are thinking now. The battery lasted 2 weeks!!!

Obviously an older story since I don't know of any recent phones with removable batteries. The modern version would be, of course, "...a certain celebrity would come to the phone shop ever 2 weeks buying a new phone..."

What I'm thinking is : why so much time before the shop workers asked about the batteries ?

Good grief; this has been the case for as long as there have been people. Rich people and extravagant gifts aren’t some kind of new invention. Not everything has to be a commentary on class struggle or some kind of Marxist validation. And the world isn’t burning; it is more prosperous and has higher standards of living as well as the lowest absolute poverty than any other time in history. Life expectancy has never been higher: the world isn’t burning and unlike the time of Marie Antoinette, people aren’t starving in the streets. Our poor people are actually fat. Poor people during that time actually starved to death in some cases.

The WHO still considers hunger the greatest public health threat (more than AIDs, malaria, etc.). Starvation is far from a solved problem.

Just because things are slowly improving doesn’t mean we can’t critique the status quo.

I disagree. You argument is because something exists, that has always existed, it should be criticized. Yet this has been consistently declining. So we are making improvements on it year over year.

Rate of change is as important a concept as change itself.

You surely must be aware that life expectancy is dropping in your country, that starving in the streets still does happen, that the wealth gap is very real, and that the planet is on a path to being uninhabitable. And yet you propose that because poor Americans are fat, that the world must be OK?

I'n not disagreeing that history repeats itself. It does. And there is good in this world. But you might want to take a wider look around a bit before declaring how great everything is.

All of those statements are frames for our astronomical & rising across-the-board material abundance.

a) We have so much food and so little need for the human body to expend energy (cars, infrastructure, oil, etc) that it’s a public health crisis.

b) We’d rather have $0 than see our neighbor get $10 while we get $5. Indicating that we have satisfied all material desires and the only thing left to do is play social status games. It’s seriously incredible that inequality (rather than deprivation) can be anyone’s main concern.

c) The planet is profoundly affected because participation in (a) is getting less unequal, spreading from rich countries to the whole world.

You are describing the tradeoffs of too much improvement, not a general downward trend.

> As fitting a portrait of our present era’s wealth distribution as any.

Wishing to buy a $172k real estate property is hardly a problem or a sign of income inequality for a US citizen, where the average home listing price is about twice that value.

There is a difference between a $172k "gift idea" and the single largest purchase most people make in their entire lifetime as a loan repaid over most of their working career.

Am I the only one who sees depopulation of rural areas as a good thing? It's an opportunity to rewild large parts of the continent. We don't need humans dominating every last square metre of the globe. That's part of what is causing most of our problems in the first place.

No, you are not alone. I see this happening on a smaller scale in my country and I see the villages that are depopulated are having poor infrastructure, very old buildings, no hospital reasonably close, no stores reasonably close. It is nice if you live on a mountain valley, not nice if the cost of rebuilding the houses costs more than building new ones and the society is hours away and the first snow of the winter will isolate you from the world till spring because it is simply too costing to open the road just for 3-4 people.

https://gizmodo.com/what-if-the-entire-worlds-population-liv...

That was quite interesting. I knew Tokyo was big but wow! I live in Singapore. I think it's a sweet spot for high density cities.

I was dumbfounded just the other day when i learned that tokyo is 38 million...

So basically that one city has the population of caifornia.

If i were a wantrapeeneur id be seeing what app services tokyo specifically from and economic and cultural perspective as if you can monitize just fraction of tokyo businesses......

Tokyo is not a city. It's a metropolitan area and one of the 47 prefectures in Japan. It contains a bunch of special wards, towns and cities inside it with their local governments.

The special wards of Tokyo are even called cities in English by the wards themselves. One example is Shibuya City: http://www.city.shibuya.tokyo.jp

I don't think the point your parent is making hinges on the definition of city. The Tokyo metropolitan area is smaller and more populous than than all of California. One can refer to LA or New York as cities and mean to include their metropolitan areas. Washington, DC is a separate political jurisdiction which is usefully and colloquially referred to as a city as well.

Greater Tokyo is roughly the same size as the LA metro with 3x the population.

So basically that one city has the population of ca[l]ifornia.

The population of Canada!

Twice the population of the Netherlands. Almost seven times the population of Scotland.

Almost double Australia!

Not everyone hates humans ;-)

Why did you say that?

Not the GP, but I'd say humans are not meant to be cooped up in these piles of boxes we call "cities".

I've lived in both rural and urban areas, and strongly prefer the former; the latter may be more "efficient" mathematically, but at the cost of a substantially-worse quality of life in my opinion.

I grew up in a rural area and now live in one of the most densely populated neighbourhoods of the most densely populated cities in earth. I strongly prefer the latter even though I still love visiting nature for relaxation. You know what runs the countryside? All the people who built houses there.

> You know what runs the countryside? All the people who built houses there.

There's a difference between "countryside" and "wilderness". I think you're talking about "wilderness", because "countryside" is kinda defined by agricultural use (which traditionally implies people living on their farms/ranches). Houses and barns are - IMO - understandably okay in a countryside. Wilderness, not so much; I agree with you 100% that it's better to not actually live in places that we should be conserving for future generations (or at least not build permanent structures; camping is fine, IMO).

Regardless, you don't have to stick to the extremes. Smaller cities/towns that allow for close proximity to either countryside or wilderness (or both!) without outright sprawling onto it would give you the benefits of both. Reno, NV is a perfect example of this: urban living in the valley, surrounded by mountains and deserts where it's easy enough to entirely avoid civilization if you so choose.

All those farms have the potential to become wilderness with urban farming, lab meat etc. In Ireland there is a 3rd type of rural where every man and his dog has built an eyesore of a house on their carefully manicured 1 - 5 acres of land. You can pretty much drive the country long and wide and never not be able to see a house like this (except in the designated nature reserves).

I'm ok with smaller towns and cities as long as they are very high density. They tend to sprawl however.

> urban farming, lab meat

When these things become practical and ubiquitous and cheap, then sure, farmland could become wilderness again.

> Ireland

That kinda explains our differences in opinion, then. The US is a lot bigger and roomier, so more space to spread out beyond the small 1-5 acre plots (you do see them still - I grew up on an 8-acre ranch - but they're typically surrounded by plenty of more open fields, albeit typically fenced).

> [smaller towns and cities] tend to sprawl, however

Only if allowed to do so, which doesn't necessarily have to be the case. We could be surrounding those towns with protected wilderness, for example. Reno's an example where the very geography makes significant sprawl less practical (though it's still happening in the north and south to an extent).

Also, one thing that often slows the sprawl is the sheer cost of extending utilities further and further from the population center (and that cost - at least here in the US - is the responsibility of the property owner). Even building your own self-sufficient alternatives (wells and septic tanks and solar panels and such) is expensive enough to be at least somewhat of a deterrent (if they're even practical in a given climate). When these towns do sprawl, it tends to be along roads that already have power lines.

No, I completely disagree with you. Having travelled the world, I feel the worst thing we can do is continue with the big cities. They need to be dismantled, and replaced with smaller, lighter, more local communities that do not require so much energy to maintain - very big city requires immense resources to keep it running, every single day.

More rural living is what will save us, imho.

Do you know what the most energy efficient people moving device is? The counterweight elevator. It's true. Cramming a village worth of people into a highrise, surrounding it with walking distance amenities is by far the most efficient, environment friendly way of supplying said populace. Yes, you need trucks to stock said stores but then again, no matter where they live you'd still need those trucks and this way a) economies of scale apply b) they don't go anywhere in single use cars. Instead of going rural, cities with mass transit is the way to live if we are this many. Reducing the populace slowly would be a strategy but it's not what the reality is.

This is why i hate cars.

Cars should be the most taxed and difficult to obtain. Cars are why humans in dense to be areas suck. Work backward from eliminating cars from daily life.

Cities provide services much more efficiently than rutal areas, but people in cities tend to consume much more. I've only seen one analysis of the issue, but the effect of that increased consumption was surprisingly big.

If your definition of city is anywhere not rural, (ie the suburbs) then I could see consumtpiom being higher since there is more stuff to buy. But living in a big city I consume much less resources because of basic facts like every item inside my small apartment has to be physically carried in by me and I have no car. I go to Costco sometimes and people with cars easily get 10 - 20x the weight of goods.

Right, but how often are they going in to get those goods? Being able to transport more in one go means being able to take less frequent trips.

Bollocks. It takes amazing amounts of oil to get the cheap stuff to the cities. The only reason these are more 'efficient' is because of arbitrary pricing - if we placed a higher value on oil-consumption, in terms of cost to the Earth, the cheap plastic junk wouldn't be being subsidised by our childrens future.

I know its not a popular opinion, but the things that take so much oil to make and transport and deliver to the people, are there so that city people can live another day without pitching into the abyss.

Rural living is better for the Earth. If I can walk to my neighbour and get butter, instead of driving to a shopping mall (air conditions) to buy it from a source originally half a country away, please explain to me how this is 'more energy efficient'. It makes no sense whatsoever, unless one is simply so enamoured by the luxuries of city life that one can't see the forest for the trees.

Cities are expensive to build, maintain, and they are destroying our future. Abandon!

Your problem is going to be that you not only need butter but also need a myriad other things and only a few of those can be self sufficient in a small local community. Yes, we shouldn't truck things from half a country away but that doesn't mean the energy consumption / CO2 footprint at the end of the day will be lower for a sprawl than a dense city.

Yes, cutting back to medieval times, wearing homespun, most amenties supplied by the local blacksmith and cobbler and some things supplied by traveling merchants , that'd obviously be more environmentally friendly. I doubt most people are ready to do that. And also -- Malthus would like to have a word with you. No way you can supply this many people with such technology.

Yes, the ultimate green solution is to decrease the amount of people living on Earth but check how China did with the one child policy.

The funny thing is that it isn't more friendly because efficiency produces big gains - look at just how much more land is required for organic farming vs conventional practices - let alone lower tech subsistence farming which amounts to 'slash and burn and then move on when the soil has depleted', heck even cooking fires produce far worse air pollution than propane stoves.

Local and small scale may 'feel cozy' but they aren't efficient - they were abandoned for a reason.

>>instead of driving to a shopping mall (air conditions) to buy it from a source originally half a country away

You should realize that population density makes it much easier to avoid driving long distances to get things, as distribution points can be centrally located. You seem to have an issue with vehicle-dependent suburban sprawl, which is justified, but ultra dense walkable "New Urban" cities are much better at resource distribution than rural communities.

Yes and no. If we're still shipping food to Wal*Marts, then yes. If we're growing food locally, then maybe no. I get the whole economy of scale and specialization argument, but not all costs are comparable. A rural community growing and eating food doesn't necessarily have to burn gas. They might be poorer than if they did burn gas to import and export crops, but they can make trade-offs to reduce gas consumption that aren't available in high-density areas.

Where is your neighbor getting their butter?

Probably from a cow milk and a bit of manual labor. Making butter is not a rocket science.

Except that is false.

A person living in a big city uses drastically less resources and energy than a rural person does.

Less/no driving, smaller more energy efficient dwellings (apartment blocks = way more efficient heating/cooling), vastly less infrastructure per capita, etc.

Nonsense. Factor in all the oil that was used to build the resources the city dweller depends on, and to maintain those resources. Factor in the sheer energy waste of cities.

An honest appraisal cannot lead to the conclusion that cities are good for us, energy-wise.

What resources are those that the rural dweller doesn't have? Still need roads, walls, pipes, etc. The majority of rural dwellers still have electricity lines and water pipes going out to them.

Actually I think you could both be right. Like for like cities are more efficient but I recently saw a statistic that said 50% of us live in cities but cities consume 70% of our resources. Consumption clearly has as much to do with wealth as where you live.

If you factor all of that in, it is less.

> Factor in all the oil that was used to build the resources the city dweller depends on, and to maintain those resources. Factor in the sheer energy waste of cities.

You need to be more specific, what specific resources are you talking about? All the resources that city dwellers depends on are also required in the villages (if we want to maintain the same standard of living), but there you usually need more of them per capita.

> very big city requires immense resources to keep it running

Because they have immense numbers of people living in them?

Anecdotally, living in a high-rise building, I am amazed how much more inefficient living in a single-family house is. From unused space and heat loss to the accumulation of junk in the garage/basement/backyard and constant ongoing maintenance of everything, it just seems to be so much waste of resources for the benefit of 2-4 people living in it.

>Because they have immense numbers of people living in them?

Because those people do less to support their own survival locally, and therefore cities require immense intake of energy and resources every day, in order to maintain that lifestyle.

>Because those people do less to support their own survival locally

That seems to be a critical modification what you originally said. Are you trying to argue that humanity can keep its current quality of life in a less resource intensive manner by spreading out, or are you arguing that we should decrease our quality of life and go back to creating food and goods on our own?

If you take city dwellers and put them all in rural areas, 90% of them are not going to start farming enough to keep themselves fed or farm at all. They are just going to order the food from somewhere else and have it shipped to them, only now the shipping will have to travel a much wider area to get to everyone

>Are you trying to argue that humanity can keep its current quality of life in a less resource intensive manner by spreading out, or are you arguing that we should decrease our quality of life and go back to creating food and goods on our own?

Both. We should spread out, gain more local independence in terms of energy harvesting, and we should also change our lives to be not so dependent on massively energy-hungry activities .. like driving 4 miles to get a burger from a drive-through.

> driving 4 miles to get a burger from a drive-through.

That sounds like suburbia. People who live in high density cities don't really do these things. We just walk downstairs.

Like the other posters in the thread have concluded. I don't see how you could be correct at all. Everything you've described in terms of energy inefficiency is something that describes suburbia. Cities have large energy requirements but that's due to the number of people there, they don't have high energy requirements per capita.

If you can show some math that shows how having a few thousand people in walking distance of a few restaurants has a higher energy requirement than spreading those same few thousand people around the country and having them stay fed _without them farming their own food_ then you might start to have an argument here but for now this seems in the realm of impossibility

Specialization means that they just require fewer resources overall.

It's less resource intensive for me and my neighbors to have one person do the agriculture than for all of us to.

It's cheaper and more efficient still if I have 30 million neighbors.

Rural areas have a much larger ecological footprint than urban areas, per capita. There's no way around that.

I think people overestimates how "remote" those "ghost villages" are. They are very small settlements (the article mentions six houses) which may be a few hundred meters from the next inhabited place. It's likely that there are at least ten thousand people living in a 10 miles radius. (I'm refering to the regions that the article talks about, population is much more sparse in other regions in Spain.)

That's a bit of a strech. You can definitely be 50km away of everything in Galicia, and probably way more in Castilla. It's true that population is more dispersed in the northwest though.

I don't say that there are thousands of people around any random point, I meant that I would be really surprised if any of the places being talked about in the article is really isolated.

It also depends on your definition of being "50km away from everything". What place are you thinking of?

Indeed. Spain is the size of California, so that may give some perspective...

indeed. it's California + 80,000 KM^2 (i.e. about 20% bigger than California)

Reading this just made me think, imagine someday, perhaps a few hundred years, if the world's population were to rise even higher briefly and then dramatically fall simply due to falling birthrates. The ruins of a worldwide infrastructure of abandoned towns and cities built for 10 or 20 times the current population would probably seem very eerie.

Recent book came out arguing fairly persuasively that we're basically there and you're going to see unprecedented depopulation in many areas by the end of the century. Title is Empty Planet - the shock of global population decline.

Places like China are potentially going to shrink by hundreds of millions of people this century.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who can work remotely who would love to live in a place like this, if it were either turnkey or at least if there were some collective action organization. Makes even more sense in Portugal, though -- you could live in a place for 182 days/yr, after putting 350k euros investment into it, with a grant of portugese citizenship. I'm sure there are similar villages/properties in rural areas too.

That always seems a good idea for those not living in the interior.

It is an urban myth to imagine one can easily move to the interior and then, by means of instantaneous willpower, cope with the most ruthless solitude. I've heard my share of stories about city people moving to the countryside to start living off their organic orchard. But when we stop dreaming and look around, people who were born there are going away or dying of old age in ever smaller villages. Alentejo still has the highest suicide rate.

I work in Alentejo as a farmer, and I recently moved from Lisbon to Beja. Beja is the capital of Portugal's largest district. Before I came here, I knew beforehand the kind of obstacles my family would face.

Close to where I work, less than 10 miles from Beja, the local school was converted to a multi-purpose building, because there are not enough children living there.

Infrastructure is still bad: on the farm, on windy days I have poor to no reception on the best available operator, and the Internet connection quality drops considerably around 5 pm; power shortages are frequent, which is a major problem for those with irrigation needs; the roads are in miserable condition; fuel is also more expensive; the central hospital still does not have an MRI machine.

And I say this having in mind all of those that, each day, fight for bringing to south Alentejo the investment it desperately needs. I fight for that too. In terms of agriculture there have been major changes, but there is still a lot to do.

Meanwhile, across the country, postal services, banks and public schools are shutting down.

In the past, several ideas have been put forth to combat abandonment, but I don't think any of those ideas are working. The abandonment of old villages is not fought by artificially populating them with people coming from large urban areas. Until proven wrong, I still believe that investment in fundamental infrastructure is what attracts people: energy, water, transportation and communications.

Selling whole villages to the rich as a solution for this problem is a gimmick, and an insult in my opinion.

> It is an urban myth to imagine one can easily move to the interior and then, by means of instantaneous willpower, cope with the most ruthless solitude

Urban myth, sure, but to me that sounds like heaven.

The great thing about Portugal is that it's a rather small country, so even if you live in the interior, you can quickly get to a large city, or even the coast.

As a portuguese I can tell you that Portugal is an amazing place to live if you have an above the average income.

May I ask what you would consider as above-average income.

If your income is 1500€+/month (after taxes) you can have a pretty good life.

It may be tricky to do remote work from one of these places. In Spain, rural areas may not have broadband at all. You may have phone line, but the quality is so bad that not even ASDL is usable.

Asturias in Spain has quite a lot of villages with 100/100 mb fiber due to a private public partnership. Our house in the little hamlet proaza has had that for ten years already.

Not at all. One does not need to go to a ghost village to to what OP says, and many towns in Europa have even fiber.

you should wait for low latency, high speed satellite internet.

Rural areas of Spain usually have decent 4G service.

Good luck getting hired for remote work in Spain, though.

Edit for the guys below: obviously I meant working for a Spanish company.

Why do you say that? Remote is remote, is I'm hiring remote, why would I care if the person is in Spain, Portugal or anywhere else? I'm sure you have context behind your comment and it would be great if you shared it.

I think the comment was referring to work remotely for a Spanish company. In Spain, remote work culture is almost nonexistent.

Taxes and compliance requirements.

At least for US companies, I do see a lot of remote positions that specify that candidates must be US based. Not sure why...

Timezone alignment. General cultural missunderstandings. People got burned by outsourcing, the original remote work.

Taxes. Travel. Time zone.

many companies, especially in US, misuse the term "remote" to mean "remote but only in US" or "remote but at least 2 days per week in office". They just want to ride the hype wave without actually changing anything

I think parent comment was referring to foreigners buying a place and working remotely.

Yeah. I am planning to get Portuguese residency through property purchase along with some friends, although we might not go for rural. Only need to spend 14 days/yr there, though.

It is a 350-500k EUR investment. If you rent the property out you should be able to cover the debt service. (Obviously it exposes you to Portuguese RE risk, as well as EUR currency risk, and requires good credit, but a 500k piece of property is a lower bar than, say, a 150k fee, and a Portuguese passport is a whole lot better than most citizenship by investment programs.)

I’d probably spend 2-3 months/yr in Portugal if I had a nice small house or apartment somewhere. It is a good country.

>If you rent the property out you should be able to cover the debt service. (Obviously it exposes you to Portuguese RE risk, as well as EUR currency risk, and requires good credit

Does that mean you are planning to get a loan to finance the purchase of the property?

Good question. Maybe the plan is to mortgage other properties elsewhere where they actually live to finance (at least in part) the operation?

You can get ~50% mortgages I believe, internationally, particularly if you have other assets to secure it with (some banks I work with will do crypto lending, at least for BTC)

Might you have sone links or literature on this program? Someone above mentioned it required you to be there for 180 days a year. I'd be interested in learning more.

Also what is the 150K fee alternative you mentioned?

150k is St. Kitts, Grenada, Panama, etc. programs.

The Portugal program is "Golden Visa". https://www.google.com/search?q=portugese+golden+visa&oq=por...

I'd rather do the Euro 250k to the arts thing if I were just looking for a single fee to pay, but I think the RE model works better. There's also an investor into companies model, but I don't know the startup market there.

How do you plan to rent the property out? Won't you need a property manager of some kind?

Yes. If it is in Lisbon we will probably do 4-8 units in a building with a dedicated concierge/Airbnb manager shared across them. Otherwise, there are services which manage like that.

Option C is a rural property and finding a long term farmer. Maybe find someone who is already farming his own land, buy it and lease back at the long term rate. Need to own the property for at least 5-7 years, but I wouldn’t be against owning Ag land indefinitely.

Do you intend to engage with the Lisbon startup community? What are your thoughts on it?

It would be matter of not working for a Spanish company. It makes taxes a bit more complicated though.

(Ironically, I did some remote work for a Spanish company when I was living in the UK)

There may be tax breaks available as well. The Azores are awesome for remote work. Faial has fiber optic lines, friendly people, temperate climate, beautiful landscape, and hiking.

https://www.azoresproperties.com/urban-renovation-tax-breaks...

>"you could live in a place for 182 days/yr, after putting 350k euros investment into it, with a grant of portugese citizenship"

Could you elaborate on this? Is there a name for this program? Might you have a link or some further reading?

There has been at least one abandoned Portuguese village turned into an apparently successful eco-tourism destination: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2010/jan/31/algarve-villa... .

> I'm sure there are plenty of people who can work remotely who would love to live in a place like this, if it were either turnkey or at least if there were some collective action organization.

http://www.tribewanted.com/

You don't get citizenship. You get residency with a path to citizenship.

https://www.henleyglobal.com/residence-portugal-golden-resid...

I've been thinking that if I suddenly had a large sum of money, I'd buy one of these villages, renovate it, add amenities and proper internet, and then rent the individual homes to people that work remote, or set it up as a kind of co-living and co-working space, like a company town.

And nobody will come if the closest hospital is a 2 hour drive and the closest store is far enough that whatever you buy costs double when you factor in the transportation. And you can believe it is a great place to raise kids if you want them to be loners, 'cause there is no school or other kid on a 50 kilometer radius. A great place to live for a monk, not regular people.

A store is one of the "amenities" I'd provide. But you're right about the hospital and education part. I'd probably have a daycare, but anything higher gets harder to do. In any case, it'd be a temporary thing for digital nomads

There's a similar ongoing phenomenon in Italy as well, with villages selling homes for ridiculously low prices [0].

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/italian-villages-selling-dol...

> Villages across Italy are selling abandoned properties for 1 euro or less, provided that owners take care of the renovations.

These renovations are typically more expensive than tearing down the house and building a new one, but that is forbidden, because there is probably some kind of regulation and "historical value". So saying that these are low prices is super misleading

My wife (who is from Italy) looked into the total costs in one place (somewhere in Sardinia), and renovations and all, it's still not that expensive.

General opinion seems to be that this is a bad thing but I disagree.

Modern life offers us much more than we'd get by being farmers. We also need fewer farmers because of automation and large-scale farming.

People want to move to urban areas. Let them, and don't judge.

Was my first thought too, but villages not growing into towns is also an indication of a different problem: it's a demographic disaster of declining birth rates.

Or consolidation of a population via internal migration into a smaller number of larger towns.

If you want a village plus broadband, buy one in Romania. Still in the EU, less developed (but for this scenario, who cares?).

Heck, it's probably going to be cheaper!

I agree. As someone from Romania who works remotely, I moved from the big city to a village about 50 km away, seeking a quieter life. Even there fiber had been run out. It only took a few days for the ISP to show up and run some fiber from the pole to my home, and then I was enjoying speeds as fast as I had previously had in the heart of the city.

Romanians are lucky that this country saw an early broadband boom in the 1990s and early millennium, and fiber was run out everywhere. Sadly, the neighbouring countries tend to emphasize mobile internet for getting villages connected instead of physical links, but that means that in villages there you cannot, for example, torrent Bluray images to your heart’s content.

Your situation is still rare in Romania. Also consider how far are you from the closest hospital (if you are far from Bucharest, Cluj, Iasi or Timisoara you are too far), a decent school for your kids, a decent place to go out (not the village pub where alcoholics waste their lives) and so on. One can live like a monk, but not raise a family in a small village or even a city like Petrosani (very nice area, but zero amenities), Pucioasa, Pascani or Pecica. There are not so many jobs where you can work from home, especially exclusive from home. I also work from home most of the time, but when I need to get to the office I spend 3-4 hours driving: not nice.

> a decent place to go out (not the village pub where alcoholics waste their lives)

If you are in your early 20s and going out every night, then a village might suck. But I’m older now, and for the one or two times a week I meet friends, I just cycle down to the train station, put my bike on the train, and in an hour or so I’m in the city.

Even when I just want a coffee for myself, there is a small town nearby with two nice cafes. It’s not all alcoholics outside the big city.

> a decent school for your kids ... but not raise a family in a small village

Are you religious or something? The vast majority of my social circle either does not want children, or wants 1 child much later in life. So, no reason that such people who prefer a quiet life cannot spend at least a few years in the countryside now.

> There are not so many jobs where you can work from home, especially exclusive from home.

Romania might be the remote-working capital of Europe now. Coworking spaces are popping up like mushrooms after rain. Yes, not everyone can work remotely, but anyone who has a university education and who uses English a lot ought to at least consider becoming a freelancer, or applying at a Western European company that will let them work from home in RO.

    Are you religious or something? The vast majority of 
    my social circle either does not want children, or 
    wants 1 child much later in life. So, no reason that 
    such people who prefer a quiet life cannot spend at 
    least a few years in the countryside now.

You may be surprised to find a lot of people on HN are already “much later in life”. Also, from the experience of several friends of mine who had a lot trouble- if you want kids you should start trying before the future mother is 40.

We were lucky to be very fertile/healthy but we also started having kids in our early 30s.

Meanwhile, in Canada, the providers are starting to market 5G, but the data pricing is so terrible, 3G is more than enough and still requires ample rationing.

I have to be careful not to stream too many podcasts. Forget music or video.

At least we have decent wired service in Canada. Out on the farm you can get unlimited gigabit service for under $100/month.

I can't get that in the middle of a densely populated neighborhood in a major city (in Canada).

In some very specific places maybe (Wightman telecom? Maybe in Saskatchewan where they have the sensibility to consider telecom a public asset?

Moving to a small rural village comes with significant downsides. Say you have kids. How's the daycare? Is there any? Can they get a good education? Can you trust basic infrastructure to be there in the future? A lot of these places are dying.

Then there's the issue of community. If you're going to settle somewhere, you probably want friends. You want your children to have friends. As a foreigner moving in, working remotely, you have very little going for you in terms of getting integrated. Even if you do put in the work to become a member of the community, you're not guaranteed to fit in. When you move to a big city and have a job there, you'll meet people and find a niche that fits you. In a small village, that's much harder.

Not to mention the initial language barrier.

Just a house in a nice village close to constansa with fiber would do. But for us that don't know much of the country or langages it not so easy to find

I strongly suspect that every estate agent in Romania, as well as at least one person in every office of RDS (the fiber-based ISP) speaks English comfortably. Foreigners shouldn’t have much difficulty compared to certain other European countries.

Thanks, yes it make sense, but i like to check listing with pictures to see if i like the style of the houses before calling an agent.

The big question is land ownership. Does the buyer get to own the land? Or is it more like a 100-year lease from the state?

$100k for large swathes of land anywhere in Europe sounds like a steal to me.

"Ownership" is meaningless. Each region of Europe have their own laws regarding what you can and cannot do with the land you "own" and what duties and rights you get by owning it. For example, you might buy one of these houses but the building codes mandate that you renovate and preserve the exterior. Heck, in some countries you are not allowed to even live in structures outside the habitable region.

Right, that's why I brought it up. In Italy, they were selling houses for $1 but the regulations around it plus the ongoing property taxes change the entire calculus.

Regardless, land is valuable but only if you own it and have some control over monetizing your ownership.

> Heck, in some countries you are not allowed to even live in structures outside the habitable region.

Isn’t that the law in most developed countries? I live in an Eastern European country that is not quite well developed and we’ve had this type of law for as long as I can remember.

In my experience, the 100-year leases (or similar) are typical of anglo-saxon / ex-British nations. AFAIK, in Spain, Italy, etc, you simply own land or not, there's no lease.

I'd be curious about taxes and other costs involved in ownership.

There's communal property in Spain, but That's tipically for shared land, forests and so on. I don't think you can build on that, so that would be a private property, yes.

In all these comments re: rural versus urban versus megacities, nobody seems to have brought up arcologies (as per the sci-fi'ish concept, not half-baked experimental villages like Arcosanti):

A city contained within a single megastructure, or a small cluster of megastructures, with large areas of natural/semi-natural, green, forested lands around them.

Manufacturing and energy generation for all the needs of their residents would be done inside the megastructure or adjacent to it.

Let's see:

• People love living spaces that they have complete control over.

• People love being near other people, without being forced to always be near other people.

• People hate feeling crowded, without any convenient escape to solitude.

• People hate long commutes.

• Unbroken stretches of concrete jungles are dystopian and depressing as hell, no matter how "modern" or glamorous they may be (see places like Dubai.)

• People love greenery, occasional communes with nature, the babbling of brooks and seeing other lifeforms flourish without impinging on human habitats.

• If given a choice without giving up convenience, people want to avoid pollution.

Cities compressed into a few ecological + ergonomic + economic megastructures would tick a lot of those boxes.

The tech may not be there yet, but I hope to see a functional arcology in my lifetime.

If you drop the self-sufficiency requirement, then cruise-ships--which are now the size of small cities--fit the bill.

Without self-sufficiency it won't fix the problem that they will still be exacting a toll (in pollution, destruction of habitat for other species) on places that they don't physically occupy.

Completely self-sufficient megastructures may still pollute their immediate surroundings, but that may be easier to contain and manage.

It's a pity Spain country side is becoming a vacuum.

It's not unique to Spain though... And neither surprising, tbh.

Who in their right mind would even want to live without stable electricity, good waste management and all the other things you take for granted in even small villages (<1k)?

There is literally nothing there besides some houses. That's enough to take a break on some holiday... But very few people would be willing to suffer through that long term

My siblings were interested in buying an old place in the Spanish countryside as a BTL holiday home, but heard some worrying things about the Spanish legal attitude to inheritance that put them off second hand places. (I won’t repeat what they said; they are neither lawyers nor speakers of Spanish so I give their fears no more than 50% credence).

This can be a problem for some people, but based on the comments I've read in the years I've been reading this site most people are in favor of paying huge taxes. Let's say you pay 75% taxes, what is the problem? When you die, the state will get the place and sell it someone else that wants to pay for it; again, and again, and again. You kids will have to work and pay to get it, for the state is just $$$ profitssss. Good business.

It’s not the state which is the problem, according to my siblings. It’s related to the family of who they might have bought from.

Again, I don’t want to give specifics. I don’t want to spread false certainty about how a legal system I literally cannot read does or doesn’t work.

An "interesting" fact of Spain is that all unwritten inheritance goes to the state, and this includes foreigners. Therefore, makes sense to lay down 200 bucks or so in lawyer fee and write the inheritance asap.

No, that's not true at all. Please read the Spanish Civil Code, starting at Chapter 3 ("De la sucesión intestada") to see what's the order of heir prevalence in case of "unwritten inheritance".

Only in the case that there isn't any relative, or widow, or widower, the State will get a 'abintestato' inheritance.

Thanks for correcting me and sorry!

Interesting, but untrue.

Exactly

In some areas of Spain, the state gets to keep a high percent of the inheritance, they go up to 50% or maybe more in some places.

No access to grid power is a pretty rare circumstance in most of the west, but even so, "off grid" (as long as you're not also "off road") is not so difficult or expensive to solve these days, on the scale of construction/real-estate costs.

"Mod cons" aren't generally the problem. What's missing is people who want to be there.

Yep. Most places with advanced economies went through this phase decades ago. It’s actually surprising that some of these settlements held on for so long, even in parts of interior France (though that was completed by the 70s-80s.)

It’s kind of romantic and idyll a sort of throwback to what Van Gogh at al might have seen in Avignon or the Comargue way back when.

And if you’re driving through France, just turn on “no-tolls” and you can drive through them. And save a fortune in tolls and cheaper gas.

Technology has advanced. You can do reasonable off-grid utilities (solar/battery/water/waste/internet) for 25-100 people at grid-level prices.

That does not make up for the lack of services in the area.

What services do you want? I can handle my own police/medical/fire in a small settlement. Same with k-12 schools.

There are plenty of small villages like that. You can even expect DSL from 1 to 6mbps, and 3G depending on the size of the place. Some of them even more.

The vacuum is mostly in Castilla y León and Castilla-La Mancha. As some of you may know regions in Spain have state-ish status, and Castilla y León actually does a surprisingly good job on education, healthcare and pretty much every social service. I'm sayin this because they have been ruled by the good old corrupt party since I have memory, have tight budget and is sparsely populated.

No healthcare, no chemists, no good Internet access, have to literally travel to buy clothes or go to the supermarket, and especially no jobs. Even in big towns jobs are scarce. Hence the asphyxiating housing bubble in big cities. It just makes no sense to live in any of those ghost villages. Unless you're some wealthy screwhead who can't stand the smallest amount of street noise.

A mostly abandoned village in Croatia that I was in still had a food truck come by 3x/week in a Sprinter. A meat truck once a week and some other food truck.

Pricing was somewhere around what the city grocery stores charged.

You could phone in orders.

In business for decades. Meanwhile in the “modern” world, I have to go to the store for my food...

One local said he only went into town once a month.

Well, it's inconvenient but in many regions you can call for a doctor visit, for example. The Castilla y León healthcare system has rural doctors that visit this places periodically.

Are these villages truly for sale? Or do you have to pay a ton of taxes, fees, (or as in Vancouver, BC - a foreign investment tax),etc? If they could be made into tax free municipalities-then great.

This would be a good opportunity for a bunch of people to collectively buy a handful of villages and turn them into creative spaces!

http://tribewanted.com

No REC in Spain - so no electricity, no water, no communications. Maybe build your own solar or something?

Yes, how dare somebody buy something expensive with their own money!

Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here?

They include: "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19529100 and marked it off-topic.

Taking a stand against a comment that nobody made!

Another sign that industrialized civilisation consumes its inhabitants. All to the citys, to sit in tiny cubicles and apartments, waiting lonely for ones demise. What a triumph, what a archivment.

> waiting lonely for ones demise

I mean... there's a whole lot of assumptions there...

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